Sponsored Content Research Articles

EXPRESS: Sponsored Content as an Epistemic Market Object: How Platformization of Brand-Creator Partnerships Disrupts Valuation, Co-production, and the Relationship between Market Actors

Sponsored content allows brands to partner with creators to reach creators’ audiences on digital platforms. However, both creators’ and brands’ incomplete understanding of this object generates two critical ambiguities: how to determine the value of sponsored content and how to effectively co-produce it. To better understand these ambiguities, we theorize sponsored content as an epistemic market object: an object that facilitates marketing functions but is only partially understood by the actors who use it . We analyze a data set of interviews, podcasts, media articles, and third-party platform reviews about—and by—content creators, brands, and intermediaries. Our findings show that brands, creators, and intermediaries create and apply knowledge to address valuation and co-production ambiguities. However, this knowledge work is incomplete, creating asymmetries in value outcomes and power relationships in a brand-creator partnership. Our paper contributes to marketing literature and practice by highlighting the role of epistemic market objects in transformative market disruptions that alter the roles of, and the relationships between, market actors. Our findings are transferable to other substantive areas such as Generative AI, Metaverse, NFTs, online news, and the sharing economy.

Etika Periklanan Pada Media Sosial Instagram di Era Influencer

The development of social media such as Instagram has transformed advertising paradigms with the emergence of influencer marketing. Influencers play a crucial role in shaping consumer opinions and behaviors, leveraging their trust and credibility to promote products in a personal and authentic manner. However, this practice also faces ethical challenges, particularly regarding transparency in marking sponsored content. Regulations and platform initiatives have been introduced to enhance transparency, yet understanding and compliance remain significant issues. This study highlights the need for stricter guidelines and education for influencers to ensure more ethical advertising practices in today's digital age. Keywords: Advertising Ethics; Social Media; Instagram; Influencer

YouTube Influencers Fostering Audience Engagement Through Parasocial Relationships

As the growing popularity of lifestyle YouTube influencers risks the possibility of over-saturation of sponsored content on YouTube, brands should determine the effectiveness of influencers and identify the characteristics of lifestyle YouTube influencers to make sponsored content successful. Drawing upon parasocial relationship theory, this study incorporates match-up hypothesis and source credibility theories to determine characteristics of lifestyle YouTube influencers and their content that increase their audience engagement and makes social media influencer marketing effective. Using the content analysis of lifestyle YouTube influencers, this study reveals that micro-influencers have a higher engagement with their audience through parasocial relationships than mega and macro-influencers.

InstaSynth: Opportunities and Challenges in Generating Synthetic Instagram Data with ChatGPT for Sponsored Content Detection

Large Language Models (LLMs) raise concerns about lowering the cost of generating texts that could be used for unethical or illegal purposes, especially on social media. This paper investigates the promise of such models to help enforce legal requirements related to the disclosure of sponsored content online. We investigate the use of LLMs for generating synthetic Instagram captions with two objectives: The first objective (fidelity) is to produce realistic synthetic datasets. For this, we implement content-level and network-level metrics to assess whether synthetic captions are realistic. The second objective (utility) is to create synthetic data useful for sponsored content detection. For this, we evaluate the effectiveness of the generated synthetic data for training classifiers to identify undisclosed advertisements on Instagram. Our investigations show that the objectives of fidelity and utility may conflict and that prompt engineering is a useful but insufficient strategy. Additionally, we find that while individual synthetic posts may appear realistic, collectively they lack diversity, topic connectivity, and realistic user interaction patterns.

Do You Care to Share? The Negative Effect of Sponsored Content on the Behavioral Engagement with a Social Media Post Containing a COVID-19 Message

During the pandemic, social media influencers were facing the challenge of balancing financial interests while publishing relevant content about the virus. This article explores how consumers would react if sponsored content was included in a social media post about COVID-19. We hypothesized that including sponsored content in the COVID-19 post would negatively affect the influencer’s perceived credibility, resulting in more negative attitudes towards the post and lower behavioral engagement. A 2 (control vs. COVID-19 message) × 2 (control vs. sponsored content) online experimental study was conducted among 18–34-year-old respondents (N = 169, Mage = 24.3, SDage = 4.66, 82.1% female). Data were analyzed using a general linear model and a moderated serial mediation model. Results indicated that including sponsored content in the COVID-19 post led to lower perceived influencer credibility, which indirectly negatively influenced behavioral engagement through attitudes towards the post. Our results provide empirical evidence that including sponsored content in a COVID-19 post might reduce the dissemination potential of the post.

Incentive Mechanism in the Sponsored Content Market With Network Effects

We propose an incentive mechanism for the sponsored content provider (CP) market in which the communication of users can be represented by a graph, and the private information of the users is assumed to have a continuous distribution function. The CP stipulates incentive rewards to encourage users to reveal their private information truthfully and increase their content demand, which leads to an increase in the advertising revenue. We prove that all users gain a nonnegative utility and disclose their private information truthfully. Moreover, we study the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed mechanism in a case study with different network structures.

The Influence of Social Media Influencers on Generation Z Consumer Behavior in Indonesia

Through a quantitative approach, this study examines how social media influencers affect Indonesian Generation Z consumer behavior. A heterogeneous group of 450 participants, ranging in age from 16 to 24, was involved, reflecting a range of genders, socioeconomic backgrounds, and geographic locations. The results show that social media influencers have a big influence on people's decisions to buy, as 85% of participants acknowledged. The majority platform, Instagram, accounted for 75% of the total, with individuals using social media for two hours a day on average. The most popular content categories (65%) were product and lifestyle reviews, highlighting the significance of authenticity. Transparency (72.5%) and authenticity (67.5%) were important trust-building qualities; on the other hand, inconsistent brand endorsements (30%) and a lack of financial transparency (22.5%) eroded confidence. Sponsored material worked very well (80%), and 60 percent of users preferred partnerships that were authentic. Strong positive correlations between sponsored content, consumer behavior, and influencer engagement were found via regression analysis (R-squared = 0.754). The findings offer significant perspectives for marketers seeking to maneuver through the impactful terrain of Generation Z in Indonesia.

Consumer's Attitude Towards Sponsored Content and the Impact of Influencer's Credibility, Brand Credibility, and Influencer's Motive

Purpose: Sponsored content in the form of covert messages is deceptive on consumers' behalf. When a consumer is aware of the sponsored content, they infer influencer motives and starts to resist such content hurting engagement. Sponsored content also adds to consumers hence the rationale of this research study is to explore the impact of influencer credibility, sponsorship disclosure, and brand credibility on consumer's attitudes toward sponsored content. The mediating role of consumer inferences of influencer motives is the highlight of the study. The framework is assessed in the light of attribution theory.
 Research Design: The research has a cause-to-effect design. It elaborates on the relationship among the constructs with an underpinning theory. Data from the sample of 218 participants were analyzed and comprehended using PLS-SEM.
 Findings: The outcome of the study has identified that influencer credibility had a significant impact on consumer's attitudes toward sponsored content whereas, brand credibility and sponsorship disclosure showed a non-significant impact. Moreover, sponsorship disclosure moderated the impact between brand credibility and consumer resistance towards sponsored content. Lastly, consumer inference of influencer motives has a mediation effect between BC and CRSC.
 Practical Implications: The relative importance of influencer motives and sponsorship disclosure is established for the first time in the current research study. The new findings are a substantial contribution to the body of knowledge and the theory. The practical implications of the study are focused on the industry.

The effects of Instagram disclosure on consumer reactions to sponsored posts: The moderating impact of social media influencers’ perceived popularity

At the request of brands, influencers promote products in their social media feed. They publish both authentic and sponsored content and, to distinguish one from the other, they are required to clearly disclose when their posts are sponsored. This research examines the impact of advertising disclosure on consumer reactions. We first propose an integrative model of the disclosing effect including advertising recognition and source’s credibility. We also examine the impact of influencer’s popularity in the disclosure process. An experiment conducted on Instagram ( n = 400) shows that disclosure negatively affects consumers’ intentions via the double mediation of advertising recognition and influencer’s credibility. It also reveals that, for very popular influencers, the negative effect of disclosure on consumer reactions through the double mediation is attenuated.

Blending Advertising with Organic Content in E-commerce via Virtual Bids

It has become increasingly common that sponsored content (i.e., paid ads) and non-sponsored content are jointly displayed to users, especially on e-commerce platforms. Thus, both of these contents may interact together to influence their engagement behaviors. In general, sponsored content helps brands achieve their marketing goals and provides ad revenue to the platforms. In contrast, non-sponsored content contributes to the long-term health of the platform through increasing users' engagement. A key conundrum to platforms is learning how to blend both of these contents allowing their interactions to be considered and balancing these business objectives. This paper proposes a system built for this purpose and applied to product detail pages of JD.COM, an e-commerce company. This system achieves three objectives: (a) Optimization of competing business objectives via Virtual Bids allowing the expressiveness of the valuation of the platform for these objectives. (b) Modeling the users' click behaviors considering explicitly the influence exerted by the sponsored and non-sponsored content displayed alongside through a deep learning approach. (c) Consideration of a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) Auction design compatible with the allocation of ads and its induced externalities. Experiments are presented demonstrating the performance of the proposed system. Moreover, our approach is fully deployed and serves all traffic through JD.COM's mobile application.

Targeting the Digital Consumer: A Study of the Role of Social Media in Modern Advertising

The research paper "Targeting the Digital Consumer: A Study of the Role of Social Media in Modern Advertising" aims to investigate the significance of social media in contemporary advertising and its impact on the behavior of digital consumers. The study adopts a qualitative approach, utilizing interviews with advertising professionals and online survey responses from consumers. The findings suggest that social media has become a vital tool for advertisers to reach a broad audience and create engagement with potential customers. Furthermore, social media allows for more personalized and targeted advertising, based on user behavior and preferences. The study also identifies that using social media influencers and usergenerated content can significantly increase brand awareness and sales. However, the research also highlights that there are challenges associated with social media advertising, including the difficulty of measuring the effectiveness of campaigns and the need for transparency in disclosing sponsored content. The study concludes that while social media presents significant opportunities for modern advertising, advertisers must approach it with caution and develop strategies that prioritize consumer engagement and transparency.

DIGITAL INFLUENCERS, MONETIZATION MODELS AND PLATFORMS AS TRANSACTIONAL SPACES

This paper aims to discuss the impact of digital influencers’ content monetization on social media in the context of platform governance. For achieving this objective, it characterizes the Monetization Supply Chain and the different monetization models as ad revenue, on-platform influencer marketing; subscription, tokenization, crowdfunding; direct selling; creator funds; besides the traditional influencer marketing. It also presents preliminary analyses of a dataset of posts by 400 influencers from four countries: Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States of America to understand how content creators from different countries are framing sponsored content.

Differences between Instagram and Facebook Sponsored Posts for Small Hospitality Businesses

In today's age of technological advancement and rapid change, much of the communication takes place on social networks, which offer a great opportunity for customer interaction. Social media is a popular and widely used marketing tool for communication between buyers and sellers. Advertising on social networks is relatively low, which is attractive to businesses, especially smaller ones. This paper aims to study the differences between sponsored content ads on the social networks Facebook and Instagram, using the example of a small hospitality business. The experiment consists of the same text and image posted on the social networks Instagram and Facebook and a post booster run through a mobile app adapted for smartphones. The results show that the promotion of the restaurant business positively affects increasing the number of followers on this page. There are also large differences in response between promoted and non-promoted posts, with promoted posts having a significantly higher response. Differences between Instagram and Facebook are listed, and recommendations for further research are given.

Your posts betray you: Detecting influencer-generated sponsored posts by finding the right clues

With the prevalence of sponsorship practice using social media posts, the detection of sponsored content becomes crucial for platforms to regulate the generated content and prevent users from being misinformed. However, there is a paucity of investigations on the detection of sponsored content in existing research. To fill this research gap, we first identify several task-related clues by referring to relevant psychological theories and practical observations. Based on the clues, we conceptualize four types of sponsored content features and propose a unified deep learning detection framework, which also learns the relative importance of each feature. Experiments conducted on 26,823 social media posts demonstrate the performance of our proposed model compared with competitive alternatives and the value of each feature. The learned feature importance also enables deeper phenomena understanding. The research findings provide actionable insights into the narrative strategies influencers adopt and how to distinguish online sponsored content.

The role of trustworthiness in social media influencer advertising: Investigating users’ appreciation of advertising transparency and its effects

Abstract When social media influencers (SMIs) post sponsored content, it should be recognizable as such. However, there is no European Union-wide legislation governing sponsorship transparency, and monitoring practices differ significantly across member states. In Romania, where we conducted our study, such regulations are only just emerging, and there are weak monitoring policies regarding advertising disclosure on SMI branded posts. In this study, we examined how two different types of advertising disclosure commonly used on Instagram are likely to affect consumers’ behavioral outcomes, such as purchase intention and intention toward the SMI, mediated by the activation of conceptual persuasion knowledge (CPK), via negative affect and the trustworthiness of the SMI. We conducted a three-level between-subjects online experiment (N=248), manipulating the absence versus the presence of advertising, which came in one of two types, brand-unspecific (#ad, #sponsoredpost) and brand-specific (paid partnership with [brand]). Considering the mediation path via the trustworthiness of the SMI, findings suggest that the paid partnership disclosure had positive outcomes for purchase intention and intention toward the SMI.

The Impact of Social Media Influencers on Brand Awareness, Image and Trust in their Sponsored Content: An Empirical Study from Georgian Social Media Users

This study aims to find the impact of social media influencers on brand awareness, brand image, and trust in their sponsored content. For this purpose, influencers’ traits were divided into intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics to measure their impact more accurately. Hypotheses were formulated, and a close-ended questionnaire was distributed to quantitatively analyse the effect of social media influencers. In total, 327 responses were collected for analysis. The results indicated that social media influencers’ perceived intrinsic characteristics positively impact the level of brand awareness, and perceived extrinsic traits positively affect brand image, and trust in sponsored content. The research measures consumer reactions to influencer marketing among social media users. It contributes to overall knowledge about social media influencers` impacts on users through implications of attitudinal persuasion knowledge and self-perception theory. The findings shed light on the implications of social media influencers` traits in relation to how the sponsored brands and influencers` content are perceived by customers. DOI : https://doi.org/10.54663/2182-9306.2022.v10.n18.88-114

Why context matters in a changing social media environment: The role of placement prominence as a moderator of disclosure effects in sponsored influencer content

Social media influencers have marked a significant change in advertising in recent years. By integrating sponsored content from advertisers into their feeds, they create awareness and favorable attitudes for products and brands. The effectiveness of this sponsored content builds on close adaptation to the original content of the specific media platform. To ensure transparency, influencers are required to disclose sponsored content. While effects of such disclosure labels and disclaimers have been widely examined, less attention has been paid to context factors that may influence these effects, such as placement prominence. Building on the propositions of the Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM), this study aims to investigate the role of placement prominence as a moderator of disclosure effects. Results of an experimental study revealed that prominent placements support disclosure labels in reducing perceived deceptiveness of sponsored content, which positively affects influencer credibility and recipients’ attitudes toward the promoted brand. In contrast, disclosure effects on perceived persuasive intent vanished, when placement prominence was high. The results emphasize the importance of context factors in the processing of sponsored content and disclosures in a constantly changing social media environments.

Adolescents’ Understanding of the Model of Sponsored Content of Social Media Influencer Instagram Stories

Our study stresses the importance of developing understandable and easily recognizable ad disclosures for adolescents as a specific target group of social media influencer (SMI) advertising. A comprehensive advertising literacy concept that includes a cognitive, performative, and attitudinal component builds the theoretical background of the present research. We examine the effectiveness of ad disclosure in the native language of adolescent Instagram users, explore their understanding of the economic mechanism behind SMIs’ advertising activities, and their skepticism toward sponsored content. Furthermore, we analyze the role that sponsorship transparency on Instagram stories plays in adolescents’ responses to advertising. A three-level between-subjects survey-based experimental design (manipulating the absence of ad disclosure versus ad disclosure in the participants’ native language versus standardized paid partnership ad disclosure in English) was conducted online with female adolescent participants (N = 241) in a European country. Findings showed that adolescents who understand the economic model behind SMI advertising have positive intentions toward the SMI and intend to spread online information about the promoted brand. However, even if ad disclosure made in the adolescents’ native language improved ad recognition, such knowledge did not result in more sophisticated defense mechanisms in the form of critical evaluations of the ads.

The effects of sponsorship disclosures, advertising knowledge, and message involvement in sponsored influencer posts

Influencers are required to make disclosures while posting sponsored content on social media. This study examined what kind of disclosures are effective and how prominent disclosures interact with advertising knowledge and message involvement to affect the recognition of sponsored influencer posts on Instagram. It conducted an online experiment (N = 296) with a 2 (disclosure type: prominent vs. subtle) × 2 (advertising knowledge: enhanced vs. not enhanced) x 2 (message involvement: high vs. low) between-subjects factorial design. Results revealed that people with enhanced advertising knowledge or with high message involvement led to greater advertising recognition, regardless of the degree of disclosure prominence. While on the other hand, when people’s knowledge of sponsored influencer content was not enhanced or when they were low in message involvement, the prominent disclosure was more effective than the subtle one in improving advertising recognition. Furthermore, recognizing sponsored content elicited resistance, which in turn led to less favourable attitude towards the brand. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings were discussed.

Managing Sponsored Content in Hybrid Media Systems: A Proposed Alternative Journalistic Practice

ABSTRACT Based on the emerging argument that understandings of digital content comprising both editorial and advertising components require alternative cultures for critical inquiry sufficiently sensitive to the online news environment, this study assesses the professional practice of balancing news and sponsored (commercial) information while focusing on preserving traditional journalism values within the realm of reasoned discussions of media ethics. In this qualitative content analysis study, different forms of sponsored content published in global media digital platforms are examined and inductive content analysis is employed.